The American Society for Indexing held its 2021 Virtual Conference, “Get Your Indexing Shot in the Arm,” on Friday, April 30, 2021 and Saturday, May 1, 2021. Three sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In the third session on Friday, Forget The Theme: Mind the Variations, Daniel Heila presented an informative overview of terms and concepts within historical, theoretical, and biographical musical literature that present challenges to indexing. With a focus on classical music, issues addressed included the following:
- Music history
- music era designation and its asynchronous relationship to other arts
- same term, different era, different usage
- Music theory
- note value and time signature terminology
- harmonic concepts through history
- instrument families
- Music biography (composers)
- division of life of artist, differing approaches
- member of what schools, differing opinions
- name spelling variants
He pointed out that “neoclassical” describes a twentieth-century movement that drew inspiration from the Classical period, while the tendency described as “Romantic” developed at different times in different contexts. An indexer who encounters a term like “Romanticism,” should “mind the variations.”
Discussing music notation, he remarked that the graphic scores by certain twentieth-century composers, in which specific pitches and rhythms are left to the performer’s discretion, were not really a new development. He showed examples of equally unspecified scores from the Renaissance and the dawn of Western music notation in the Middle Ages.
He stressed that the “humble” triad, fundamental to centuries of music and an apparently “simple” building block, should not be taken for granted. He showed how its context and function can enormously complicate its apparent simplicity.
In closing, he brought up the favorite “silent” piece, John Cage’s 4’33”, to illustrate the concept of music as nothing but “organized sound.”
In the next blog posting I will discuss the first Saturday session of the ASI 2021 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.